"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

T. S. Eliot was pretty awesome. If for no other reason than for having written my favorite poem ever, and for having said that. That said, I stole this quote from a friend's profile the other day:

"Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversation, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery--celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Goddard said: 'It's not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.'"

- Jim Jarmusch

I like that. First of all, because I happen to enjoy devouring everything he mentions--including the random conversation, bridges, architecture (cathedrals!), bodies of water, and light and shadows. Light is my favorite part of photography. And I love it when I find other people who "devour" everything he mentions too. They pursue what makes them curious, what interests them, what they question. Secondly, the demand for "original" work is intimidating and doesn't so much inspire me as nurture feelings of inadequacy. Third, it reminded me of David Lynch and how he says you need clarity to create.

I was reading an article today on a New York Times Online blog called "Proof." One contributory, a novelist named Brian McDonald, wrote a post entitled "Under the Literary Influence," about how he used to be addicted to booze-addled authors: Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Eugene O'Neill. McDonald loved reading their works and reading about their lives. To him, there something romantic about seeing Hunter S. Thompson catching fire when downing flaming shots of Bacardi 151, that made him see "a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers … and a pint of raw ether" instead.

Now, I like a lot of these writers. I love Fitzgerald's lyricism, Chandler's tone and distinct dime-novel style, Kerouac's poetry, O'Neill's tragedy. I've read a little Bukowski, which I thought was alright, though outrageous, and I tried to get through A Farewell to Arms but I just couldn't do it. I respect that these guys wrote some great stuff, and I understand that a lot of it wouldn't exist without all the drugs and alcohol they took. At the same time, I wouldn't be able to do that myself.

I guess it's my stubborn pride (me? proud?), but I wouldn't be okay with taking responsibility for something born of a substance-induced inspiration. I think I mentioned this in my "Clarity" post too. It'd feel wrong--it wouldn't feel authentic, to me. I'm finding more and more that I'm not very adept at expressing myself in any medium. I have problems when I try talking to people, and I feel like I'm not a particularly sophisticated or notable writer. Screenwriting is showing me that it's not a great medium for me, and I'm beyond awful with poetry. I can't paint or draw and I just can't seem to grasp the technical aspects of photography. But what stuff I do write and plot and paint and photograph is mine. I can take a little pride in that it's authentic, it's real, and it belongs to me--it's my own expression, my own view, my composition. It doesn't belong to an altered state of mind--to the alcohol I drank or the drugs I took or any other crutch.

At the same time, that strikes me as extremely self-righteous and silly. If I feel like I would have to give credit to psychotropic substances, then wouldn't I feel like I owe credit to all sources of inspiration--everything from which I steal? "Old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversation, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows." Wouldn't my work belong to all of that, to everything that contributed to it? In that sense, I enjoy the idea that something created is the sum of everything that inspired it, and that it wouldn't be what it is without one of those parts. "J. Alfred Prufrock" wouldn't be the same without the opening from Inferno or the allusions to Lazarus, Michelangelo, or Hamlet. The Great Gatsby wouldn't be what it is were Fitzgerald not so influenced by the old Roman story of Tremalchio. Again, though, to me, interpretation and reinterpretation are creation, and to steal from all over and use those thefts to assemble something else is, in a way, creation, too.

Plus, that's just the way that I feel about it. I don't have a problem with other people writing through hazes--clearly, since I love Fitzgerald and Kerouac--it's just a personal thing. I've gotten pretty decent at not judging others by my own standards for myself--most of the time.

...

I had more to say but I'm sticking it in a separate post because this one is already absurdly long and incoherent and lacks any semblance of unity whatsoever. It's just all been on my mind and I had to get it out before I forgot. This just took over two hours. Yikes. Way past sleep time now.

Edit 2/22/09: I split it up. This was just too damn long.

'Gone Baby Gone' and Moral Ambiguity.

So this movie was pretty damn good. Plot description coming up with possible spoilers. If you're one of those people who can't watch a movie if you know how it ends, then forget it. Go away. Vanish. (Okay. I think I've watched Kiss Kiss Bang Bang a few too many times now.) But seriously. This movie's definitely worth taking the time to watch, and if you're going to refuse to watch it because I ruined the ending, then stop reading now.

The short version: Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan are Patrick and Angie, a pair of young, inexperienced private detectives hired by a Boston woman and her husband, Bea and Lionel, to find their missing niece Amanda, who's about four - she's the daughter of his trashy, coke-addict sister Helene. Enter Morgan Freeman as Capt. Doyle and Ed Harris as Det. Remy Bressant. Doyle is the head of a unit that specializes in finding missing persons, who brought Remy out from Louisiana years earlier. These guys have the experience, but Patrick and Angie have the connections and know the people of the rough neighborhood the girl is from. Throw in suspects ranging from gang members to drug dealers to pedophiles, and you have a pretty messy scenario that you don't want to have anything to do with. Patrick and Angie take the case anyway. Over the course of months, the investigation is closed and reopened, another child goes missing, suspects come and go, authority figures come into question, and in the end, Patrick and Angie - Patrick in particular - are faced with a moral quandary that doesn't seem to have any good answers, and they are forced to define right and wrong, good and bad, based on their own persons, on what they think is right. It's pretty intense.

And okay, my roommate's boyfriend is snoring. Loudly.

Anyway, I really liked the movie. I think when you get down to it, the world really isn't black and white. You can choose to see it that way, but I think that is, in essence, denying reality and avoiding it. In this film, everything is just this dark, gross, murky gray that is every shade of wrong. You have good people doing the wrong thing for good reason, and how do you deal with that? Do you look the other way or do you do what, morally, is the "right" thing to do, even though it might not be the easiest thing to do or even the best thing, in the long run? I think in a black and white world, what Patrick ends up doing is what would be considered the "right" thing. But in the real world, I wonder if it really is. The movie ends in that ambiguous state - with Patrick clearly wondering if he made the right choice - and it's hard to tell. It's hard to know what would have happened next if the movie kept going, if it showed the people's lives 20 years later. And it's hard to know, because it could have gone in several directions. I think that how you think the story ends sort of shows how you're inclined to view the world and life, kind of the way that the end of Life of Pi challenges your faith. You can think a child can overcome his or her environment and not be completely messed up after growing up in an insanely dysfunctional home that's not conducive to raising children, or you can think that a child growing up in those circumstances is doomed from the very beginning in an Oscar Wilde "every woman becomes her mother" way.

It's funny. I definitely thought, as I watched the end, that Patrick made the decision that guy would make and Angie made the decision a woman would make. He went the straight-up moral route. She went the morally-less-acceptable-but-more-emotionally-influenced route. His concern was for how the adult this child would become would feel about everything, and for the child's mother. Her concern was for the child and the adult that the child, outside its home, had the potential to become. He chose with his head. She chose with her heart.

In all honesty, I would probably have taken Angie's route, but it would have been, in part, for selfish reasons: I don't think I could have lived with myself if I made Patrick's choice. It would have been torture to wonder for the rest of my life whether or not things were going to turn out okay for the kid. And if they didn't, I don't know how I'd ever handle the guilt of knowing I condemned a child to a miserable life.

Okay. I should have been doing homework. Slash sleeping some more. But oh well. I'll just panic later.

I started writing this 6 months ago and am finally finishing it.

I think the disparity between what we do and who we are is a really strange thing. My brain has trouble reconciling the two. Like I think I've said in the past, it seems like your actions should reflect who you are as a person. But I was thinking the other day. Maybe one or the other is just something superficial and ultimately irrelevant.

I mean, really. You can be the most morally straight person in the world, but one mistake - one situation that train-wrecks on you - one false move - if it's epic enough, that's it. Does that one mistake define you? That stupid quote from Batman Begins (well, it's not stupid, but it's a succinct way of stating something that bothers me), "It's not who I am inside, but what I do, that defines me." Who you are defines you to yourself. But how you act defines you to the rest of the world. Strangers don't know who you are. They judge by what you do, until/unless they take the time to "get to know" you. But does that even matter? Or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe what you do is superficial. It's just the surface, and who you are inside is what really matters. I guess really they both matter, since they're intrinsically linked and inseparable.

You can know what's right from what's wrong and what you consider to be the highest, purest way to live. You can aim for an ideal life of loving everyone, being merciful, loyal, determined, vulnerable, strong, and all that. But does it really matter? Unless you personify all that, unless you do as you say, are you the person you see on the inside? Or is that just the person you want to be? Your ideal that you work towards but will never achieve?

I guess to some degree it depends on how successful your attempts are. And I guess that the important thing is that you try. People always distinguish that there's a difference between being a bad person who does bad things, and being a good person who did a bad thing. I bet there are plenty of "good" people in prison but for one bad thing. But just because they're a "good" person, doesn't negate the fact that they did something bad. Same thing. Just because you aspire to be a "good" person, doesn't mean that your actions or true personality reflect that.

I don't think I actually said what I was trying to get across. But that's okay. I've got other stuff to do.

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Now playing: Augustana - Hey Now

"Unconditional" Love, 'Mansfield Park,' 'The Jane Austen Book Club,' and Marriage.

Okay. So our parents are supposed to love us unconditionally, and I suppose, vice versa. I mean, they literally give us life, whether by bringing us into the world or raising and teaching us, or both. And I feel like that's a big line with parents: "You know you can always come to us with anything. We'll always love you no matter what." And so on and so forth. Just unconditional love. Though on some level, I feel like that's kind of redundant, because if love really is pure and true and all that, then wouldn't it be unconditional, and if it wasn't, then wouldn't it not be love? At least, in theory. But anyway.

Rereading Death of a Salesman made me think about that state of unconditional love between parents and their children, and how desolate a person must feel without that. I mean, you have Willy Loman, who thinks his son Biff has been spiting him for 15 years, and breaks down in the end when Biff cries on his shoulder, and Willy realizes that, despite everything, Biff really does love him. Then, you have Willy's wife Linda, who takes his side over her sons', and actually kicks Biff out and agrees that he shouldn't come home or write back ever again. And I don't want to spoil the ending for anyone who hasn't seen it, but Before the Devil Knows You're Dead... Albert Finney's character...he must decide between his love for his wife or mercy for his sons. In Mansfield Park, the Prices have no qualms shipping off their 10-year-old daughter Fanny to live with her aunt, uncle, and cousins, and are not in contact with her for 8 or 9 years. When she is able to visit and they finally see her again, they welcome her with indifference - at the most. Then at the end, Sir Thomas pretty much disowns his daughter when she enters a scandalous affair with the guy trying to court Fanny (even though she is thoroughly repulsed by him). I don't know. I just think it's incredible that there are people who can choose not to love their children like that. Even in putting her baby up for adoption, a mother is showing more love than these characters. It makes me wonder, though, is there even such a thing as truly "unconditional" love? Wouldn't unconditional love be eternal? So if all love is finite, if it all can end or learned to be dissolved, then can it ever really be unconditional? Yet I suppose one might argue that no love, when it's true, is finite, because it transcends death, etc. etc.

But anyway. Back to Mansfield Park real quick. Apparently Jane Austen wasn't too big on the whole subtlety thing. She spells out pretty much everything out for you. Fanny is good because she has sound principles, high moral character, and modesty. Maria and Julia Bertram, and Mary Crawford, are bad because they do not. Edmund is good - everything Fanny has learned is from him. Henry Crawford is bad because, even though he shows reform and is positively influenced by Fanny's goodness, he is inconstant. Edmund ends up marrying Fanny because he realizes that she is wholesome, pure, principled, sweet-tempered, and he knows this: "Her mind, disposition, opinions, and habits wanted no half-concealment, no self-deception on the present, and no reliance on improvement in the future...she was of course only too good for him..."

I suppose you could say this directness makes her stuff weaker than more modern stuff that has more subtext and ambiguity and all that. But I like it. It works. Just because she states it plainly, doesn't mean that her insights on the human condition aren't just as sharp. Or that her writing lacks humor or irony. One bit I particularly liked in the conclusion of Mansfield Park is her remark about purposely not giving dates as to what happened when:

"I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that everyone may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people. I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and become as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire."

I like how Austen kind of mocks the fact that Edmund had said he could never love anyone as he did Mary Crawford, but does so gently, because she realizes that it's not unusual at all for him to stop loving her and fall in love with Fanny. In doing that, she also is making the simple statement that even "unconquerable passion" can end, can learn to be forgotten. I also like that she doesn't give dates because it would be different for everyone, and there should be no judgment in how long it takes someone. She also could seem to be suggesting, though, that Edmund fell in love with Fanny out of convenience, though I don't think that's true. The same way I don't think it's true that Henry Crawford was a bad guy - I also like that Austen says how he really would have been much better for having married Fanny, that her influence would have kept him straight. I don't think I would have minded if Fanny married Henry instead of Edmund. But if Edmund had married Mary...oof. Fanny had a good influence on Henry, but Edmund had no influence on Mary, and that just would have been disastrous. But I suppose Edmund and Fanny deserve each other's goodness.

When Sylvia reaches her angry stage in the film version of The Jane Austen Book Club, she says that Mansfield Park shows her that a marriage is only as strong as its weakest link. In that vein of thinking, Edmund and Fanny's marriage would last because neither is particularly weak. I started writing a post a while ago about Sylvia and Daniel, and his little speech about how he was struggling with wondering whether or not love (and consequently marriage) could sustain for a lifetime:

Daniel: I was just thinking about something Allegra said at Jocelyn's the other day...so we're talking about how we all need to have connection, you know, conversation, sex, companionship, and Allegra says, "Well, you get all that from Mommy." I have to tell you, it really made me sad.
Sylvia: Aw, baby, she'll find somebody.
Daniel: No, it made me sad for us, because I've been struggling with whether a marriage can sustain all of that over, uh, over 20+ years or if it's just inevitable that after a certain amount of time-- maybe being with somebody else can have a renewing effect, because for me-- I've been seeing a woman at work. We've been together 6 months now . . . We, we can't think of this as a failure. We have had a very successful marriage. We've had a long marriage, by any standard. We got 3 wonderful kids. They're grown, they're working, they're--
Sylvia: Just open the damn door, Daniel, I need a tissue.
Daniel: The kids, that's, that's all you, you know, you made all the sacrifices, I know. But there's a logic to us quitting while we're ahead, and I think they'll be able to see that, you know?
Sylvia: I don't understand a single word of what you're saying, Daniel.

It made me think back to that whole idea of people coming and going in and out of your life, and how perhaps we only have a limited amount of time with them, and how it varies. Say we do only have a certain amount of time with people - perhaps that time, for you, can be different from what it is for them. You may feel the connection longer than they, or vice versa. You may be ready to move on before they're ready to let you go. Going with that, then maybe falling in love is just finding someone that can't ever imagine letting go, and your best potential spouse is the one whose love, whose sense of connection, lasts only as long as yours does.

The whole institution of marriage sucks. At least, in the frame of mind I'm in now, I think it does. It takes something completely irrational (love) and forces you to make it practical. Rawr. Obnoxious.

Wow. Did NOT mean to write that much. Nap time!

"You know, there is nothing greater than deciding in your life that things maybe really are black and white!"

I think I will forever be in awe of people who can do that - who can just look at life and the world in general and see nothing but black and white, right and wrong, with no gray area.

I used to like the gray areas. Somehow, that was comforting - knowing that if I never found the answers I was looking for, it was okay, because sometimes, there are no right answers.

Now it pisses me off and it's probably the one thing I struggle with the most.

I was going to write more about uncertainty and faith and forcing yourself to adapt to function in the world. And something else about denial and misinterpretation and self-deception and The Talented Mr. Ripley. And about how difficult it can be to change your basic nature and overcome inherent (and sometimes also seemingly irrational) fears and such. But now I really don't feel like it.

I think I'm developing carpal tunnel in my right hand/wrist. Booo.

"The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn."

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
- Reinhold Niebuhr


The wisdom's definitely the tricky part. There is so much proverbial advice given about this. We are told to learn to accept things we can't change, to always fight for what we want or believe in, to pick our battles wisely. The problem is, which advice to we take and when?

With people, it's even more difficult. When do you give up on a person? What do you accept and what do you refuse to tolerate? And why is it that we accept certain flaws in some people and not in others? Why do we more readily accept fault in our friends but not in strangers? This natural inclination to forgive or excuse our friends and not others makes us so closed-minded.

"We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves." - Galileo Galilei

The hardest of these questions, I think, is: Is love always enough - Is love enough of a reason to stay with someone who hurts you, or someone with a fault that you despise? Do you stay and fight to make it work, excusing the flaws and the pain the person causes you, or do you walk away because even though you love the person, you deserve better? And if you walk away, what if you never find better? Should you have stayed? And is walking away equivalent to giving up?

I guess it depends on the situation, but still. If ever there existed a gray area where there are no clearly defined answers, it's here.


"The time to give up on people is never."
- Tracy, The Philadelphia Story

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Listening to: Augustana - Hotel Roosevelt